Chang Chun Itself

Changchun looks like Mexico. The colors, the concrete construction, the conspicuous lack of green space. It is the third world trying to climb up. Poor people starting to see some of their number make some money. After passing tenement style housing we get tot he bus station, a few blocks from the train station and I take a stroll to see what is around. Shops are everywhere. the first floor of every building, almost, has stores and what look like apartments above. I walk through a mall, outside of which some sort of hip-hop dance performance is going on. It is Labor day weekend for the Chinese. I buy a belt and try to haggle over the price and, for what seems like the twentieth time, the sellers won't have any of it. 35 yuan for a belt seems a bit much to me. It is only $4.50 but this is China. I buy it anyway. I ask a cab driver if he knows McDonalds, he doesn't. I smoke a few cogarettes and stroll through the open stalls in the mall again. I ask another driver for "may don la", my best guess at a chinese approximation of the English pronunciation. KFC is, after all, "ken dan gee". This time i've got it right. I sit and enjoy my big mack meal and watch from the second floor a presentation in front of a jewelry store. models in slinky, tight dresses take turns standing around, like models, and flashing rings on their hands. Many people stand and watch.

I wander the city for a few hours, alone. We are required to sign out of the Academy and to travel with someone else but i forget this weekend. I feel pretty safe and conspicuous. Everyone is nice and though most people stare a bit no one is obnoxious. They are more used to foreigners here. I think i am getting used to being "special" to drawing attention and it feels almost as strange when i don't as when I do. Being an extreme minority is quite the experience. The rampant consumerism is starting to wear on me as I walk through a huge indoor mall with Armani, D&G, and other absurd brands that are most likely knockoffs, if good ones. I passed a "ANMANI" shop ourside the mall. Prices here are marked but I know that people must still bargain because they seem much higher, still not too close to american prices but high. I begin to yearn for a place where bargaining is not involved in practically every purchase. Fast food, the train station, and the grocery stoor are about the only places where bargaining is not essential to avoid being ripped off. Please can't someone do it for me. It is exhausting and even if you get the price cut in half you still don't feel great about yourself. I was so fed up i paid 50 yuan for a hat and didn't bargain one bit.

I met my fellow student travellers at a Five star hotel constructed, seemingly, out of marble and red carpet. It was pretty awesome but the decor was forgotten as we sat down to an "all you can eat" buffet. Chefs were on hand to cook steak and fish any way you likes as well as sushi chefs to keep the plates full of rolls and sashimi that melted in your mouth. I ate pasta, salmon(blackened and baked), steak with real blue cheese, squid, and deserts by the plate and by the bowl. Icecream with chocolate sauce, fruit yogurt puddings, cakes, and a chocolate fountain to dip fresh fruit. I stuffed myself till i almost passed out. It was amazing, the highlight by far. A close second was the game of bowling we played before dinner. I crushed everyone as they don't bowl much, but wasn't it great to hear those pins even on this side of the world. We hit the clubs for a few hours that night and I danced to some popular hiphop and we had fun, then I slept in a hotel room with six other people and after a bit of shopping and a two-and-a-half hour train ride standing between cars i was back at the Academy for some rest. Si Ping will have to suffice for my travel destination for a while, I spent more than any three weekends previous on this blowout. It was worth it.

Hope all is well in the land of the Free, I hope the English accent i speak with most often here doesn't linger after I get back. I can't help it, surrounded by Brits as I am. Peace y'all.

To Chang Chun

Everyone, not literally, but many people from the academy went to Chang chun over the weekend to celebrate three birthdays and to get away from our little world here. Most people came to Si Ping on friday and bought train tickets for saturday morning and some just took the train to Chang Chun on friday night. I waited till saturday morning to try to buy my ticket and there wasn't anything until 3pm that day. So i went outside and asked some of the bus drivers if they were going to chang chun. they kept pointing me in the same direction but after the third bus I realized they were pointing towards the bus station. I went to the ticket office and asked what times they had for buses to Chang Chun and found a 10:15 or an 11:00. I asked for the 10:15 and the woman told me to come back later and get my ticket. I went to KFC and then went shopping at the Zhong Xin. Around 9:45 I see if anyone was at the internet cafe and headed to the bus station. i bought my ticket and by 9:55 i was sitting in the station, eating a banana, and reading "Time's Arrow". I opened a soda bottle for two old women with a tiny girl and spent some time making faces at her and the little boy sitting next to me. I had stepped outside to smoke, the bus and train stations being two of the few places it is not permissible to smoke but spitting is still allowed, and cabbies come up to try to convince me to take their service to Changchun. they try to suggest that I would be much more comfortable in a car with music and room to stretch out. They are faster than the bus, they say. For a mere 200 yuan i could ride to Changchun in style (my words, not theirs). I merely point out that the bus only costs 25 yuan and the price drops to 160. When I point out that I have already bought tickets they turn away. At the bus station i go to buy a bottle of water and pack of Baishas for my little trip. I choose a nice looking old woman to buy from and she is keen to sell me. I point out the Baishas and ask for a bottle of water. She bags them and tells me 6 yuan. I tell her 4 and she starts to tell me no, that the things I want are more, the cigarrettes 4 and the water 2. I tell her i know the smokes are 3 and i take out the expensive water and choose the brand that i know costs 1. She gives me a rueful chuckle and wags a finger at me. i am learning here.

I spent the three hour bus ride reading and sleeping and watching rural china out of my window. Here, in China, they farm every scrap of land possible. In the US i am used to flat stretches of farmland stretching off into the distance, but here, the land is whatever shape it is and the farming is done against the natural contours of the land. They plant up and down the side of hills. They plant to the very edge of the arable land. If there are sections of a field that are not plowed and sown, or ready for sewing, then they can be assumed to be unplantable. All the work is done by hand. Donkeys or mules draw the plow in front of the men working. Crops are seeded one at a time by people, usually old men, using these strange pogo stick-esque devices. I have yet to see any harvesting but I imagine it is all accomplished through china's greatest resource: Labor. Farmer's appropriate, annex, sections of highway to dry their corn. It is spread over the road and then walked through, forming rows, mirroring the land they have pulled it from. Furrowed like the fields. When it is dry it is swept and scooped into sacks, weighed, and the sack is sewn up. The sacks, which must weigh around 100lbs., are then hand loaded to overflowing onto trucks.